Stupid ESP Watch: The Big Lie

I received a cold-call voicemail yesterday from a representative of an e-mail service provider looking to do a barter deal.

Never mind I’m not the person to approach for barter deals—or any other type of non-editorial issue, for that matter—the sales rep made one statement that made me cringe.

“Our delivery rates are very high,” she said.

That statement has no place in a pitch from an e-mail service provider.

Why? Because the main factors that affect deliverability are all within the list owner’s control.

As has been written here repeatedly, the three main metrics ISPs use to determine whether or not incoming e-mail is spam are the number of dead addresses the marketer attempts to reach, the number of spam traps the marketer hits and the number of spam complaints the mailer’s messages generate.

An unacceptably high rate of any or all three of these metrics can result in delivery troubles. Note that all three are related to list hygiene and message relevance and none have anything to do with who is sending the messages on the marketer’s behalf.

As a result, the people who have the most significant effect on an e-mail marketer’s deliverability are those who decide when to remove non-responsive address, those who decide how often and what to mail to subscribers, and those who oversee the program’s e-mail-address-acquisition efforts.

Any one of those people or groups—if they’re not all the same person—can kill a company’s ability to reach subscribers’ inboxes.

For example, a marketer can exercise herculean restraint in e-mail frequency, aggressively removed dead and non-responsive addresses, but if the chief marketer buys a bunch of addresses from a vendor and forces the e-mail manager to add them to the company’s file, deliverability hell will ensue.

Likewise, a marketer can implement careful list-hygiene and permission-based address-acquisition practices, but if the guy from the corner office suddenly notices the e-mail program is extremely profitable and orders the e-mail manager to double mailing frequency, recipients will increasingly report the mailer’s messages as spam, resulting in probable deliverability troubles.

Notice the e-mail service provider is nowhere to be found in either of the above scenarios.

This isn’t to say an e-mail service provider can do nothing to affect a marketer’s deliverability. For example, if an ESP doesn’t fire clients who spam, everyone who uses that ESP can suffer some damage to their e-mail reputations.

However, an ESP touting high deliverability rates is somewhat akin to touting high response rates and should elicit the same reaction: “How can you have high deliverability rates? Isn’t that determined by your clients’ activities?”